


The Blue.

by polyphenols



Category: Shin Sangokumusou | Dynasty Warriors
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Historical References, Multi, Original Character(s), Unhealthy Relationships, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-05
Updated: 2014-09-05
Packaged: 2018-02-16 05:20:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 15,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2257284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/polyphenols/pseuds/polyphenols
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jia Chong watches as Sima Zhao becomes the person he cultivated, but not the one he wanted, as his personal life falls apart and Zhao's legacy begins to unravel. Written mid-2013.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Prelude**  
  
You start at the end.  
  
On a perfectly cloudless day you encounter each other. The morning city is strangely tranquil, and you have to remind yourself that there is such a thing as peacetime calm. You have just come a long way, up too many steps to count, until you are finally of a level to look him in the face. He studies yours; you do not know whether he is going to smile, to shrug, to pardon or accuse. You know that it is all and none of these. You hold each other’s gaze for a moment, and then move past one another, your shoulders not brushing his, and walk on.  
  
Because he has walked out into the sun you do not turn back. Because you have known each other for all your lives you do not speak his name. You think that there will be time later, that you will speak, later. In this city it is rare for the sky to look so blue and unblemished, for the sun to shine so warm. As you cross the dimness of the hall you think this: you will grow used to it, the way your ears are ringing with silence, the way he has and has not looked at you. And he will get used to it, this new self that you have made for him, the skin to live in and the crown to wear, your absence which is the substance of your nearness. You think this: all the mistakes you have made are not mistakes, and anyway there is time, there is a new year and an entire new era ahead for you to make amends, to understand at last what needs amending. This is a beginning. You think this, and you turn into the shadows, without knowing that you have started at the end.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
1.  
  
Sometimes Jia Chong has to remind himself that Sima Zhao has friends.  
  
It is in Zhao’s nature to make friends with unstoppable immediacy. An arm around the shoulder, a bad joke that becomes funny merely by the enthusiasm with which he tells it, a suggestion to slack off for the afternoon so compelling you can hardly argue against it. Such lovely sunshine, Zhao would say, with a yawn nearly as infectious as his exuberance. Such a pleasant day can’t just go to waste, and besides, he’s just acquired two bottles of the finest wine. No one would miss them if they went off for oh, just an hour or four. No one would care but Zhuge Dan, and _he_ could deal with it. A laugh, an insidious wink, _oh it’s just between us, don’t repeat that, will you?_ And then against your better judgment you’re off raising hell with him, stealing pastries or painting on walls or something equally absurd you would never have imagined yourself, the respectable vassal of Wei, to have ever been doing. Sima Zhao’s talents for persuasion are remarkable; he has just never applied them in the proper ways.  
  
Little wonder, then, that Zhao is well-liked. The most unlikely assortment of people, at one point or another, have called him their dearest friend. Zhong Hui had laughed with him, when Zhong Hui had not thought himself above laughter. Chen Tai had wept with him, when he had thought that no one was watching. In this city, of course, someone is always watching. And when you have someone to laugh with you and someone to weep with you, you no longer think you need anyone else, even if that vacancy has become, to the coolness of outside observation, a thing almost physical.  
  
Sima Zhao had many friends, and now he has but one.


	2. Chapter 2

2.  
  
Lately Jia Chong has been finding himself, at parties, draping an arm around some half stranger in almost unconscious motion, just so she will have another person to kill. Just so she will not find the right one.  
  
Lady Guo is his wife, and there are times when Jia Chong finds it incredible to recall that he was ever married to anyone else, a woman whose very presence has been exorcised from the house, a ghost among the living. A crimson trail of silk, and a few lines in a poem—that is all he has to remind himself of the woman named Li Wan.  
  
In the year before Sima Shi’s death, Li Wan had been banished from the capital city along with her relatives, for their involvement in a plot against the ruling Sima clan. When the decree was announced, Jia Chong had thought momentarily, with an excitement akin to madness, that he would leave everything behind and go with her. Break every bit of finery in the house and set it on fire; that was the kind of exalted finality he wanted, that was what it was to really be in love. But of course it never happened, and he had not really been in love. “You have your entire life’s work ahead of you,” Li Wan had said to him, before she left, as if that was reason enough for her not to look sad at their parting. “We are very different from each other, you and I, so I will not say anything more. I wish you well.” She had not been the sort to need anyone else, or to let any setback cause her unhappiness, to even possess a drop of unhappiness buried however deep in her being. They were very different, yes. But once they had written a poem together, line by line, and now Jia Chong cannot remember which of the phrases were hers and which his. That, at least, should be proof they had once understood each other to the point of interchangeability. These days he finds that any hope, any sign of understanding another person is the most desperately desirable thing in the world.  
  
After the annulment of his marriage, Sima Zhao had taken him aside to console him, though Jia Chong was not certain that he needed consoling. They sat on the rooftop drinking, watching as the constellations traced their slow progress across the deepening summer sky. “You have to forgive my brother for making such a decision,” Zhao said, running a hand through his own ruffled hair as if in frustration. “It’s for the security of the country, and all that—damn it, I don’t even want to think about it.”  
  
“Would you have done the same?” Jia Chong asked, and watched Zhao sit up straight in surprise.  
  
“Not to you! Good god, you really are taking this hard. Drink up.”  
  
Jia Chong drank, and wondered whether what he felt then was, absurd as it seemed, a twinge of disappointment as fleeting as one of the falling stars that blinked across the sky. Sometime during the year that followed Zhao had given him an amulet carved out of turquoise, supposedly for good luck in battle, although Zhao’s apologetic look when giving him the gift made Jia Chong suspect that it was still in reparation for something else. He wore it anyway, its light blue circle the only spot of color on his otherwise monochromatic clothing. Heavy, but such things always were.  
  
The year after that Sima Shi had died, and by the time they were back in the capital Zhao was standing up straight again, as if to show the world how he could endure and move past his grief. When Zhao stood at his full height he was a good half a head taller than even Jia Chong, and carried himself with the sort of confidence that made it seem like he would never, _could_ never depend on anyone else. That was the Zhao that Jia Chong wanted to see, even if he had to pass through sorrow to get there, even if he had still gone to Chen Tai and cried with him in private. But history would not remember a detail like that.  
  
“I could turn a blind eye to the decree that my brother made regarding the Li family,” Zhao told Jia Chong later. “You have but to say the word.”  
  
“And what would the people say of you, if you could be influenced with just a word?” Jia Chong met his gaze levelly until he looked away, and a few months later Zhao had been all smiles at his wedding with Lady Guo.  
  
 _She is very much like you_ , the matchmaker had told him, and at the time Jia Chong had taken it as a good sign. It had been a strange wedding, the customary bright red of the decorations unable to stave off the aura of gloom that seemed to emanate naturally from the newlywed couple. When her pale eyes met his there had been a flash of something like recognition, a glimpse inside a mirror. The realization like cold water being poured down his spine: _I have been known, I have been seen, but all just a little too late._  
  
  
.  
  
  
“If only I’d met you earlier.” He says this with a bitter laugh, years later, when they have gotten to know each other well and then more than well. Moonlight and blood on the floor, and she stands with her arms crossed, surveying him with a tight-lipped smile.  
  
“Then I would have been to you what you are to me?” she asks him, voice tracing cold notes in the air. “I don’t care about that. I don’t care about _who_ you think you want, because they’re all temporary and you’ll figure it out soon enough. You’ll see. There’s only one place you can come back to.” And with that she curtsies elegantly and floats past him, with a low hint of laughter and the slightest backward glance, stepping over the corpse on the floor as if it is nothing and nobody at all. He has learned long enough ago that nothing could save anyone she suspected of being his lover. Has been hoping, if such a thing as hope could still dwell in him, that there are certain things she will never know. Because then what will that make them? They will be two regicides living under the same roof as man and wife, and even in all the extravagantly bloody history of their country there will have been nothing like it. (Unforgivable. Deserved.)  
  
Quite unconsciously he touches the light blue amulet hanging in front of his chest. Years ago, when Li Wan had told him how different they were, he thought he had already known enough of regret; now he knows it is a far worse thing to find someone so nearly the same. But not identical, he thinks with a cynical smile. He does not think he will ever find the nerve, the honesty to speak the things she just did.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lady Guo is not referred to by her full name, Guo Huai, in this story as it would cause confusion with that other Guo Huai.


	3. Chapter 3

3.  
  
He does not remember how he and Zhao had met. “We’ve known each other all our lives,” he replies, when he is asked, because Yuanji is the one doing the asking and he thinks that he had better come up with an answer. They are sitting in a teahouse constructed of dark weathered wood, and outside the day is damp and chill with slow-falling rain. It is not the sort of day where he can just excuse himself and go for a walk. Doubtless when she invited him she had thought of that too.  
  
“The two of you are very different,” Wang Yuanji remarks, studying him with eyes the color of burnished gold. “It is good for Zishang to have many friends unlike himself.”  
  
“It is your influence that he should be most grateful for.” Jia Chong thinks that he means this. Yuanji, who is the same age as him, has been an even more constant presence in Sima Zhao’s life than himself, a voice of reason gently but firmly guiding her husband in the right direction. The love of his life. Jia Chong finds it absurd, really, that Sima Zhao has someone he can call the love of his life. As if for all his flighty mannerisms and noncommittal jests, there are things rooted deeply enough in his life that he cannot just laugh them off. As if it is possible that someone—that it is possible for anyone to push him ever forward, in just the manner that he was meant for, without causing him pain.  
  
Jia Chong is not jealous of Yuanji, but he is envious.  
  
“I have heard the soldiers remark on your friendship in a particularly poetic way.” She says this with neither approval nor disdain in her voice, sipping the tea. “They say two of you are like day and night, like sun and shadow.”  
  
“It’s a wonder how we ever get along, right?” Jia Chong replies with a faint and self-depreciating chuckle. He cannot number all the times Zhao has been exasperated with him, asking him whether he couldn’t just live in the moment for once, forget all his worries and schemes and the hypothetical future of the country he carried like a weight around his neck. (Not of the country. Of you.) All the times Zhao looked at him with something like pity, maybe affection: _you never change_. “If I am his shadow, that is because he burns so brightly.”  
  
“People make the mistake of thinking sun and shadow are opposites. They are not.”  
  
It is true, and she has this way of being right, of always meaning more than she says. If he is someone else he might even be afraid of what else she can see with those eyes. In this kingdom of theirs, built out of scheming and betrayal and waiting until all the virtue in the country had died a natural death, it has often been remarked that all the men are terrible and all the women terrifying. No, she is right, and he is not Zhao’s opposite, does not think that after Li Wan he could ever allow himself to care for an opposite again. To Sima Zhao he is merely what is needed. It is possible—he thinks these fantastical thoughts sometimes, too absurd to ever be put into words. It is possible that the destiny on one person’s shoulders is so great, so illuminated that the fates themselves will give him what he requires, fill the void around him with the people he needs. To Sima Zhao, that is all he should be.  
  
“I think you underestimate yourself,” Yuanji is saying now. He does not know when it has stopped raining. “You speak often of Zishang’s potential, but I have always observed clearly what potential you have of your own. This current regime was brought to life by the replacement of the old by the new. This past century has taught every person in the country with a speck of talent and ambition that they can do the same. So why not you?”  
  
Jia Chong smiles what others have called his cat’s smile, cryptic and wide on his pale face. He supposes that he can do it if he tries, that she has calculated and imagined for herself what steps he would take, if he were to take it all. Knows that she has compiled a list of all those whose loyalty to Sima Zhao might one day come into doubt, has seen every rebellion in the past few years coming except for one. (Zhuge Dan’s, and that she could not have foreseen because it was one he had nurtured and made to fail.) He wonders now if she has imagined taking him down, planned out already how to turn the tables on Zhao’s right hand. Whether that is something she wants or needs to happen, just as he has needed every one of those other little catastrophes, just so that he could feel his service, his _use_ to Zhao was as solid as the axe in his hand. “Milady,” he says, “why would I want to?”  
  
“I am relieved to hear of your loyalty,” she says, “but I do not insist that it be pure. To fully understand his ambition, you should have at least a little of your own.”  
  
“I do not pretend to fully understand Zishang,” he replies. “That honor is yours, and I hope you will be kind to him, whatever his faults.”  
  
The worst part is that he means it all. By the time they finish their tea, the sun has managed to puncture the clouds, and he watches her leave in the faded golden light, confidence in her stride making her look far greater a presence than her diminutive stature. No, he does not understand Sima Zhao, only a fictitious version of the man that he has drawn up for himself: visionary, leader, founder of a dynasty that has yet to be named. And that Sima Zhao, if he ever comes into existence, will not have the need to favor him with one kind gesture, one laughing backward glance. For now he still struggles, and every moment of tenderness and camaraderie Zhao shows to him, every hesitation and crisis of conscience is something that should not be. Every kindness is a torment. Every suggestion of happiness—of love—is a failure.  
  
(How is it, Lady Yuanji—how is it that we think we are both after the same thing, but the measure of your success is that you still have a person real and warm to lie beside you?) In another world, he thinks, if he had never existed, then Sima Zhao might have been great as well as happy.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The assassination of the Emperor, and the dilemma of Chen Tai.

 

“What would you have me do? Oh heaven above, what more do you want me to do?”

After they had killed Zhuge Dan, Sima Zhao had gone to Chen Tai and wept. Jia Chong had pretended not to hear, even as everything that happened in the capital traveled to him as if by the invisible lines of a spider’s web. Spies reported to him even when he did not want to be reported to, placed his hand firmly on the pulse of a dying regime. And it had become slowly evident that he would have to deliver the finishing blow.

“I still believe that I failed him.” Zhao said this, perhaps a week later, picking the red and gold feathers out of the fan that every Zhuge seemed to feel compelled to carry. “I could have gotten through to him. He was too simple-minded, too inflexible.”

“And the inflexible do not survive,” Jia Chong told him. “It is foolish in this age to be so adamant about one’s ideals as Zhuge Dan had been, and as I recall your family never had any patience for fools.”

“Eh, I suppose you’re right.” Zhao stared into the distance, lost in what Jia Chong knew to be the useless pity that was a ruler’s luxury to waste on the rebellious vassals he had to put down. The problem—the infuriating, insolvable problem was that Zhao simply wanted to be _liked_. That, too, was a desire particular to the ruling class: to be friends with everyone when it was imperative that they remain close to none.

(I think you would have been more suited to a time of peace, Chen Tai had said to Zhao once. You would have been an accomplished adventurer, or the owner of the best tavern in the country. Chen Tai had said many things, and Jia Chong had always made sure to not overhear.)

“Do not expend pity on those who tried to undermine you,” Jia Chong advised. “There will be more.”

“You think I will be so hated?”

“If necessary I will be. But not you, Zishang. The people will always know that you are generous and kind, that you put others before yourself in your thoughts.” It was not entirely clear to Jia Chong himself until he said it, that this was the gift he would give to Zhao. Perhaps it was not enough, perhaps not even possible. But it was the only thing Zhao wanted enough that it seemed like a physical ache, this boy who had grown up laughing in the shadow of greatness, who had inherited all of his father and brother’s brilliance but none of their ability to bear the loftiness of isolation. But history had chosen him instead, almost arbitrarily, had cut his name into the stars.

\--If I cannot make you happy then I will at least make you beloved. You are, of course you already are, but that much you will never need to know.

 

.

 

 

In another life Sima Zhao would have learned that pity and sympathy, too, were weapons that had to be sheathed lest they be turned against him. Would have known at last to close the open book that he had been, would have run out of patience for all the turncoats that he had once wanted to win over as friends, would have at last come to call them what they were, outright fools. In another life, one where Jia Chong did not forever step in front of him to keep the blood off his hands, he would have willingly stained his own.

When he slew the Emperor of Wei with one downward stroke of the axe, Jia Chong had not turned back to see how Zhao was looking at him. The halls were dim with years of incense and soot, the ashes of forgotten plots and ploys and so many ancient hopes. Decades ago, he remembered, the houses of Cao and Sima had been so firmly united in their common goals that no one could ever doubt them, and their leaders had walked complicit through places just as dark as this one. Did the first emperor of Wei ever step far enough down from his lofty throne to say, _Zhongda, I trust you absolutely?_ Surely the way things were, he had not even needed to say it aloud. And yet things changed, seasons turned, and the vows made by dead generations, however much sincerity they had been spoken with, were long forgotten.

(If it does not matter that two people had once sworn to each other to take on the world, had shared a perfect understanding—if in the end one lineage still extinguished the other—

If one day, in this same place, generations hence, my blood shall turn on yours—)

Jia Chong did not permit himself to follow where those thoughts would lead. He had two daughters with Lady Guo now, and they had her looks or perhaps his, walked as silently as if they were borne aloft by the shadows that seemed to trail after them, the electrical darkness that lived within their laughter. Everywhere in that house was bleak and cold, and out of some futile hope he named the girls after impossible things he could only dream of, images of light and warmth. _Wu_ , for the noonday hour, and _Nanfeng_ , for the southern wind.

(And if one day the wind should sweep into this city—)

Even now he was planning, thinking years ahead for his family. The very notion of the distant future pitched him into a sort of vertigo sometimes, the sense of standing at a precipice, staring down into a depth the bottom of which he could not see. _My family shall become close to yours, we shall be devoted to each other for generations, it is all I can do and all I must do_. And yet the prospect still instilled a sense of terror in him. It returned now, when he knew he had to remain irreproachably calm, even as the blue ornament worn in front of his chest was staring back at him, darkened with blood. He put his hand to it as he walked out of the hall, tried to cover it from the sky or the sun or the eyes of passersby. Zhao’s voice resounded in his ears, those words he had said before they committed their crime. Zhao’s voice as he had always wanted to hear it, cold and determined and unwavering, but no longer his own.

_I am finally what you hoped I would be_ , Zhao had said. _Isn’t that what you wanted?_

( _Good god_ —he covered his face momentarily. Not a show of weakness; when he made that gesture people usually thought he was laughing. _Why did you have to think about it like that, why did you have to care about what_ I _wanted?_ )

 

 

.

 

 

Expectation is a very different thing from desire.

Sima Zhao expects nothing from his friends, because they expect the world of him. In return he asks for only their company, their willing ear to hear his complaints, their complicity in covering his ass when he runs off from his duties. Sima Zhao may want these things, but he does not expect them. And what he wants most—every leader learns this, eventually. What he wants most he cannot have.

“I swear, out of the lot of you, Chen Tai is the only one who still understands I’m just a regular person.”

And out of the lot of them, Chen Tai was the one who stood visibly trembling after hearing of the Emperor’s assassination. Chen Tai was the one who turned toward Zhao without fear or hesitation but only the pure clarity of anger and said, “I know you didn’t want to do this.”

Jia Chong himself had been standing with arms folded, leaning back against the wall in a posture of feigned relaxation. Let it play out, he thought. Let it be, and see what happens.

“You understand,” Chen Tai said, “you’ve committed the most unpardonable sin in the history of this dynasty, in the eyes of all the country. I know you’re better than this, Zishang. But I’m willing to forgive you.”

That was Chen Tai’s failing—Jia Chong almost chuckled aloud then. That someone who had the nerve to call himself Zishang’s closest friend could still think that there were times when Zishang _needed_ forgiving.

“In the path that I’ve chosen,” said Sima Zhao, the Sima Zhao that Jia Chong had been forging, the one that had finally taken form. “I will not solicit anyone’s forgiveness. Not even yours.”

The young man shuddered violently then, as if he had been physically hurt. “Then do what is right,” he said, and there was enough force in his voice that Sima Zhao took a step back.

“What would you have me do?” Years of their friendship, no doubt, hovered in the air before Zhao in that moment, an entire mutual history that Chen Tai with his unblinking severity was threatening to erase. Zhao looked agonized, slipping back toward his former self that only saw what was in front of him, that wanted nothing more than to be liked and admired and then left alone. “Oh heaven above, what more do you want me to do?”

“Think upon what you’ve done. For your reputation, for the sake of putting things right—you have to renounce this crime and execute the one who committed it. Only then can this country be placated.”

It was then that Jia Chong finally let himself smile. Part of what had garnered him such an evil reputation was his ability to appear so coolly confident, amused even, at the height of the greatest controversy against his person, or in the face of the most perilous threats. Only Sima Zhao had seen that there was anything beyond that. And now, in front of Chen Tai’s indignant face, Jia Chong smirked at him and held a hand up in a casual wave, black fingernails catching the light momentarily as if in added affront. “I’m right here,” he said.

To his credit Chen Tai did not back down. “Yes, you,” he replied. “Zishang, please kill this man.”

Sima Zhao looked from one end of the room to the other. Lost again, for a moment, the boy running from his lessons, hoping that someone, anyone will tell him that he didn’t have to do this, that things were going to be just fine. “Ask of me anything else,” he finally said. “Please, ask of me anything but that, my friend.”

“We have known each other all our lives. You cannot expect me to go back on my word.” When Chen Tai left the hall they watched him go silently, his small silhouette vanishing sharp and thin into the pale daylight outside, and then Sima Zhao had grabbed Jia Chong by the collar and flung him against the wall. “Do you know what you’ve made me do,” he said, breathing rapidly and at some near incoherent junction of guilt and rage. “I’ve lost one of my closest friends.”

_Not both?_ Jia Chong wanted to ask. And as wrong as it seemed, as utterly irrelevant to the grand scheme of things as it was, the thought filled him with a cold little jolt of something like joy.

 

 

.

 

 

Chen Tai had not lived for much longer after that incident, and Jia Chong knew people blamed him for that as well, claimed that his wickedness and Sima Zhao’s callous reaction had caused too much grief for Chen Tai’s heart to bear. Jia Chong did not mind one more accusation, did not even mind the not-quite-formal, slightly awkward way Sima Zhao spoke to him now, the way they talked even more than before but always about official business that never seemed to end. Even the low-ranking soldiers had seemed to notice: _oh, Lord Jia Chong and Lord Sima Zhao don’t seem as close as before, what a shame_. The penchant for gossip in their kingdom was something that they had never succeeded in stamping out, so he never even considered reprimanding anyone he overheard. No, he wanted to correct them, what would really be a shame would be if Zishang forever remained the same.

Once, not long ago, Sima Zhao was someone who expected nothing of his friends. Now all they did, the two of them, was make plain their expectations to one another. As always expectation was something very different from desire. As always Jia Chong thought that he could want nothing more.

 

 

.

 

 

He thinks she is asleep, nestled against him, but then she whispers in his ear. “Who is it?” Lady Guo asks, and the pressure of her hand draped over his shoulder is still insubstantial and calm. Her eyes are closed, he thinks, and behind the soft curve of her smile her teeth are hard and white, behind the perfect mask of her face she is thinking lullabies of murder.

“There’s no one,” he replies. Her hand slides over his hand now, fingers slipping into the spaces between his. “I have no one but you.”

“You’re not lying,” she says, not a question but a judgment pronounced almost in wonder. A quick laugh that jitters in the cold silvery air. “You’re not lying, and I feel sorry for you.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Zhong Hui's thwarted rebellion as the apocalyptic beginning of a new era, or maybe the first nail in its coffin. The incident recounted by its sole survivor, a discreetly gleeful Wei Guan. Who might be Jia Chong's anti-conscience. And if anyone doesn't need an anti-conscience...

“It never ceases to amaze me,” Wei Guan says, years later on some evening when the moon is round and the flowers fine, as the poets like to say whenever they want to make an excuse for falling in love. “We survived what no one should have, saw things that no one else can imagine. I might be good at escaping, but you’re _gifted_.”

“You’re drunk.” Jia Chong surveys his compatriot with an air of what the other has often called _respectful condescension_. Wei Guan has the looks and constitution that have run in his family for generations: fragile and refined, with a vaguely tragic air that those who do not know better find fascinating. These days he is known as a man of learning, a calligrapher, and only incidentally a politician, and one faultlessly loyal to the Sima clan at that. Even if Jia Chong has been more gifted at the art of escape, Wei Guan is the one who had gotten away with his reputation intact.

“I don’t drink.”

Wei Guan doesn’t drink because he has supposedly been dying of incurable ailments since he was twenty, a claim which no one has ever contested. Now, a few decades and three civil wars later, he looks as well (or as poorly) as ever, and empty bottles litter the table between them. “And my nails are naturally this color,” Jia Chong replies dryly. “It isn’t like you to reminisce. Perhaps you’re finally growing old.”

“I just find it hard to believe once I think about it. That this country is still standing after what we’d done. After how we began. I feel as if I should be sorry, but I am happier with every passing day. I feel as if I should miss someone, but I have no one to miss.” At that Wei Guan pauses and studies Jia Chong, a transparent smile gliding over his features. “Are you luckier than I am, Jia Gonglu? I’ve often thought so.”

“Luck has nothing to do with it.”

“I don’t know how it is for you, but every January still reminds me of that one.”

“Don’t you think,” Jia Chong says with a cold chuckle, “that maybe I hadn’t wanted to talk about it?” But it is too late, and as he drains the cup before him he is already recalling the memory of places he had not been, the snapping of banners in the freezing wind, the torchlight, the snow on the ground.

 

.

 

 

There were times before that January when Sima Zhao had still seemed happy and carefree, when he was with Yuanji, for instance, or when he let the conversation between himself and Zhong Hui and Deng Ai wander away from strategy and politics. The seasons were changing, and he was sure they would be able to conquer Shu before year’s end. One more piece of unpleasant business, Zhao seemed to be saying with every gesture, one more great burden to undertake before he could rest easy and live the ordinary life he still craved. During that year Jia Chong did not contradict him. No, running a country would be a far more difficult task than uniting one, but for the moment he did not want to disabuse Zhao of his illusions. They were readying their armies now, an arrow pointed at the heart of the enemy’s kingdom, and there was no guarantee who among them would return.

The days blurred together before the final campaign, before the assault at Jiange and the impossible stealth maneuver down Shu’s perilous mountain range. Deng Ai patiently explained the lines he had drawn on the maps for Zhao, who listened to every word without interruption. Years ago Deng Ai had been a bookish man, with a persistent stammer and almost no flesh on his bones; it was out of sheer dedication to his country, supposedly, that he had become someone else entirely, molded himself to fit into the role that he felt obliged to take on. There was not a drop of vanity in his blood, just as there was not a drop of humility in Zhong Hui’s. It was common knowledge that those two would not be able to get along for a day, and yet they were the two commanders that Zhao had selected for the mission.

“Are you quite certain about this?” Jia Chong had asked. “You have seen, many times, what misplaced confidence and excessive ambition have done to the stability of this country. Do you really trust a man like Zhong Hui, and with such a large army?”

“By that standard, should I suspect you as well?” Zhao looked back at him in consternation.

“I would rather you did. That would at least mean you have become more cautious, Zishang.”

“You are both my dearest friends.” Good gods, how to explain this, after all he had taught him, how could Zhao still call anyone his dearest friend? Improbable as it seemed, Zhong Hui had become one of Zhao’s closest confidantes, tolerating his irrelevant behavior just as Zhao turned a blind eye to his arrogance. Perhaps it was the commonality in their experience, the fact that they had both come from esteemed families that had simply expected too much. But Zhao’s childhood, at least, had been a happy one, while Zhong Hui had grown up with a mother who ignored him, a father so ancient that Hui’s bloodline was always in doubt, and his father’s jealous mistress, who had tried to kill him while he was still in the womb. It was little wonder that he had tried to distinguish himself in all that he did, as if only through extraordinary achievements could he prove he should rightly exist. Jia Chong did not fault him for what he was. Jia Chong did not fault anyone, really, for what their varied circumstances in life had led them to become. Even then, before that January, he had believed it was not personal. That every obstacle he had removed around Zhao was removed for being exactly that, an obstacle, and not for its proximity.

But the fact of it was that Sima Zhao and Zhong Hui still talked to each other. Laughed and joked together, if such a thing was even possible. There had been the time when, after inviting him to come along on a carriage ride, Zhao had driven off laughing with a flustered Hui chasing after him, shouting indignant curses and sending various objects flying through the air. Zhong Hui had not held a grudge for that, amazingly enough, nor had Zhao held a grudge against him for daring a make a mocking rhyme about his father’s name. It had been phonetically brilliant, Zhong Hui would always insist thereafter, and Zhao let him retell the story at parties with nothing more than a shrug. Jia Chong had thought he finally understood how those two worked, that year: Zhao thought he was the one person who Hui did not look down upon, the one person for whom he would make an exception. And for that he did not care who else the young man offended with his pretensions and airs.

That was what it boiled down to, after Zhao had finally grown into his role as a ruler. That was what he had learned or perhaps had known all along. For all his friendliness, Sima Zhao did not care about _you_ , personally; he just wanted to be your only exception.

And he’d succeeded at that, Jia Chong realized. With Hui, with Deng Ai who had put down his books and taken up arms, and with Yuanji who was now the love of his life, when she had previously destroyed men with a single word. And of course he had more than succeeded with Jia Chong himself.

It was more cynical an analysis than he had ever dared to make of Zhao before, but at the end of that year he could not stop himself from thinking it. Had realized, at last, that he did not mind.

 

 

.

 

 

Wei Guan did not make anyone his exception. “How is the Lady Guo?” he asked, when they were holding a banquet to raise morale before the final assault on Shu. “Lovely and murderous as always, I presume?”

“You mock the private lives of others because you have none of your own.” Jia Chong had given him a dead-eyed stare and no tone of detectable offense in his reply.

“I need none. In this era you grow too sentimental about anything—a person, a place, an ideal like that bloody nonsense about _benevolence_ —and then you die.”

“I thought you were nearly dead anyway. I am surprised Zishang is even letting you participate in this mission, given your delicate health.” Jia Chong said this with just enough of a smirk to indicate that he did not mean it.

“Why, the way you make it sound, I’d almost believe you advised him against it.”

“I did.”

“Out of concern for me, or fear that I would hamper him? You _are_ terribly predictable, Jia Gonglu.” Wei Guan blinked, a momentary illusion of regret passing over his face. “But I like the predictable. When I was young I was told, if I could be said to have one talent, it would be—”

The crowd of revelers surged around them, and someone tugged on his sleeve. Jia Chong found himself being pulled away, drawn into a tiresome but seemingly endless conversation, then another. When he extricated himself from the party at last, he found himself standing outside in the cooling air, the night sky black and dense with stars. There in the palace gardens he thought he saw Sima Zhao standing turned away from him, contemplating those same stars with cup in hand. Finding, perhaps, that after all the noise and revelry he had surrounded himself with, he was no different from his father and brother, he too wanted to be alone.

“Zishang,” Jia Chong said, and Sima Zhao turned with a small smile, not the too-bright one he always wore but one so genuine that it could only have been imagined, and then it was. Jia Chong blinked; no one was standing out in the gardens tonight. The grass was heavy with dew, as if it had been rained down from the stars.

“Did you know,” Wei Guan said next to him, and he was not surprised, not really, that the other had managed to approach him without a sound. “While you were off by yourself just now, a fortune teller came to our table, one of those decrepit old hermits who only come down from the mountains once in a decade. Generals Zhong Hui and Deng Ai were also present, and the old man told us three that only one among us would live to see the end of the next year.”

“Do you believe that?” Jia Chong asked. He himself took no credence in any talk of the supernatural, and supposed this latest interlude was just another way for Wei Guan to scare himself.

But there was no fear in his compatriot’s voice, only a hint of curiosity. “It seems a very compelling thing to believe. I would have liked for there to be more people at the table, though. I would have liked to hear what else there was to say.”

 

 

.

 

 

The conquest of the Kingdom of Shu, when it did happen, came as anticlimax. Everyone from the commanders down to the peasants had been anticipating it for years, no matter how much of a bitter resistance Jiang Wei and what was left of the old guard put up, and the agreeable terms of the surrender had come to the losing side as a relief.

Jia Chong had noticed, in the days that followed, that Sima Zhao did not act as if the victory had been his own. It was a relic from older times, handed down like an article of clothing from his father and brother, and he wore it uneasily, laughed and shrugged when his followers praised him and drank toasts to his brilliance. He did not quite know what to do with the new world that had opened up to him in its wake, even if he spoke the language of policy and plans fluently now, just as Jia Chong had taught him. The mountains of Shu were always green with mist, and weeks could go by without seeing the blue sky, the sun no more than a distant brightness through the haze. During the long campaign there Zhao always seemed to be blinking against the light, trying to discern through the fog what it was that fate meant for him to see.

In another life Sima Zhao would have been observant. If Jia Chong had not been there to observe for him, he would have learned to see things through a more discerning lens. In that life Sima Zhao would not have been surprised to be thanked by the man he defeated, the former Emperor of Shu whose hazy smile would not have puzzled and frightened him as it did now. Late at night he and Liu Shan would have drank and talked what he would discover to be a common and established language, that of an intelligent mind posing as a fool.

But in his current life Sima Zhao did not even joke that he was a fool. There was too much for him to do now, and even to those who had won the country for him, he was not as patient and indulgent as he once had been. When Deng Ai alone had received the highest commendations for his contributions to their victory, Zhong Hui had not even seemed offended, not at all. Zhong Hui had invited Jiang Wei to live with him, and the defeated Shu commander had accepted, as if he really desired nothing but a peaceful life now, this man whose fevered dreams had set the landscape aflame nine times over. In the company of one another, Zhong Hui was toned down, humbled, and Jiang Wei was pleasantly mild, neither of them speaking a word of their own brilliance and frustrations. Their visages were young and clean enough that it was hard to even read into them the shadow of deception.

That was what Jia Chong had heard later on, because he had not witnessed it himself, having returned to the capital with Sima Zhao and nearly no one else. Zhong Hui and Deng Ai had remained within the former borders of Shu; there was too much to manage there still in the wake of conquest. Wei Guan had not gone back either; he had claimed he was too ill to travel, and Zhong Hui had merely said with a smirk, _I’ll keep him then_. Of course the situation was not ideal, of course Jia Chong had his suspicions even then, but—the voice in the back of his head seemed to whisper to him more anxiously these days—his place was by Sima Zhao’s side.

The dead of winter passed, the end of the year. In the capital city even winter could be warm, if you lit enough torches and hearthfires to keep out the cold, if you kept them burning merrily through the hours of the night. Before they knew it another year was on the verge of passing.

In another life Sima Zhao would have seen it coming.

 

 

.

 

 

“They are all three of them dead.” Wei Guan told them at the end of January, kneeling with head bowed and dark hair trailing on the floor, complexion pale as paper but with the faintest afterimage of a smile on his lips. “Your reign is quite safe, my lord.”

Sima Zhao stood up then, and for a moment seemed to be choking on words that could not force their way out of him, his eyes bright with anger or perhaps grief and remorse. In the end he had said nothing at all. And Jia Chong, standing off to one side in the shadows, had thought there was something familiar about that day, reminiscent of some other sunless morning years ago. It had all been prefigured, this moment they had arrived at. (You could always become _more_ alone.)

How it all began, then. How they arrived at that terrible day. There is always a sequence of events, if you retrace your steps carefully enough. There is always a story to tell.

Shortly before the new year, a letter sent in secret by Zhong Hui had arrived at Zhao’s desk, implicating Deng Ai in plots of treason. The proof, in his own handwriting, had been attached. “Him, of all people?” Sima Zhao had asked, shaking with rage, and Jia Chong realized that he believed the accusation. As improbable as it was. There had been too many times, over too many years, when he had been betrayed. When Jia Chong had turned to him: _look, I told you so, you should have never shown mercy in the first place, you should have trusted none but me._

And so Zhao believed now, could actually believe that the patient commander who had put aside his books to win him a kingdom would betray him. (Those words again, the echo of a long-ago day: _I am finally what you hoped I would be. Isn’t that what you wanted?_ )

Jia Chong had said nothing. He could begin to image how this would play out, knew for reasons he did not yet want to name that he needed it to. Zhong Hui did not know, perhaps, that _he_ knew of his talent for forging anyone’s handwriting. Wei Guan probably did. Half the country away on his hypothetical deathbed, Wei Guan was expecting him to forget that he knew.

By the time Sima Zhao wrote the decree for Deng Ai’s arrest, his hand was not trembling. “I’ll have him brought back,” he said. “I’ll have him explain himself to me, and then we shall see who was in the wrong.”

You do realize, Jia Chong thought to answer, they won’t bring back anyone alive enough to answer? But he did not need to say it. If this was the Zhao he had crafted and shaped, then there was no doubt he already knew.

A few days later the letter was sent, they sat in the study and tried to block out the sound of firecrackers going off constantly outside, every sharp burst of noise startling the winter air into wakefulness. “No news,” Sima Zhao said, elbows on the table and hands working through his already unruly hair. “And no reports from Zhong Hui. What if he’s also going to, what if he…”

“We’ll know soon enough.”

“I should have kept an eye on them. There were so many things I should have—”

“No more of what you _should have_ done, Zishang.”

“It hasn’t even been a year since we took Shu. And now I’m going to lose those who did it for me?”

“Then that is merely proof you hadn’t needed them anyway.”

There was something hilarious about finally being able to say it, and Jia Chong supposed that he had someone else to thank for that, had a world of bitter gratitude he would be able to express later if that person stayed alive. And so he was not surprised, really, when Wei Guan was the one who returned at the end of January, travelling as fast as bad news could.

The brief summary of the story he gave: Zhong Hui had rebelled, had been plotting with Jiang Wei all along to overthrow the Sima clan. What they planned to do afterward the two had never agreed on; the arrogance of the one and the dogmatic idealism of the other, if they ever came into conflict, would have been something truly glorious to see. But word of their scheme had gotten out, and those in the army still loyal to Sima Zhao—Wei Guan himself chiefmost among them, of course—had risen up and killed the traitors after a hard-fought battle. A shame, a loss of precious talent, but what could one do? Wei Guan had seemed almost sorry when he was saying it, subtly sad in that way of his too artful for anyone to want to accuse it of being feigned.

And as for Deng Ai, he had been arrested according to orders. Someone—here Wei Guan shrugged—had killed him during the ensuing chaos, who knows. He coughed delicately and rose to take his leave, and then Sima Zhao asked him, with the last wavering note of uncertainty that was ever to break his voice, “Do you think he had been framed?”

Wei Guan turned back with a lingering look, his eyes moving but not his face. “Do you really want to know?” There was a note of supreme confidence in his voice, the cold crystallized triumph of one who had survived with impunity. But Sima Zhao was staring directly ahead, Sima Zhao did not care, did not notice, did not want to know.

 

 

.

 

 

“I thought you were dying.”

“So did Zhong Hui.”

Jia Chong caught up with Wei Guan in the courtyard outside, the new powder of snow on the ground blindingly bright under the relentlessness of late morning sun. “You are the most dangerous man left in this kingdom,” he said, and it did not come out as a threat as he had intended, but almost a compliment.

“But no danger to you or Lord Sima Zhao. I think you can suffer me to live.” Wei Guan shrugged and tried to look annoyed. He was out of breath from trying to keep a faster pace than his pursuer, and it almost seemed that his frailty had not been feigned after all.

“So what the hell really happened?”

“It’s nothing that could interest you.”

“Tell me anyway. If you fake being sick you can always get better, but you can’t fake an axe to the face.”

“You’re not nearly as hilarious as you think you are, Jia Gonglu.”

“If you’re anything like I think you are, you want to tell. Everyone wants to tell.”

“Fine.” They had stepped aside into the meager shade of a few bare-branched trees, off the main path, and it was as good a place as any to tell a story meant for no one to hear. “Do you remember where you were on New Year’s Eve?” Wei Guan asked. “Drinking and reveling with Zishang? Or at home and wishing you were—but safe, no doubt. That night, when it snowed everywhere from Chengdu to Changan, was only the first of many that I was not supposed to live through.”

“You seem to have made it out fine.”

Wei Guan took no note of the contempt in his listener’s voice. “I was one of the only people Zhong Hui told his plans to. He wanted a pawn, I suppose—someone who seemed weak, with no great desires of his own except for self-preservation.”

“And is that not what you are?”

“Hmph.” A vague smile, the question ignored. “In any case, he told me readily that he had framed Deng Ai for treason, that the warrant was out now for his arrest. And I was to be the one to do it. Deng Ai had his army with him, and Zhong Hui had not wanted to alert him by bringing his own troops. Or perhaps he could not bring himself to go personally, who knows. Hadn’t you noticed that Zhong Hui had a tendency to go to pieces, any time he had to genuinely speak his mind?"

Another reason he was unsuited in his role as a friend to Zishang, Jia Chong thought. “But did he speak his mind to you?”

“He hardly needed to. He was beside himself with giddiness, so secure had he been in his victory. And he had thought that he was sending me off to die. I was given almost no troops or resources, and he believed that Deng Ai would resist arrest and end up killing me. Even an honest man, in the confusion of being wrongfully accused and driven against the wall, would lash out—that was how Zhong Hui thought. And then the concrete proof of Deng Ai’s treason would be there, in the form of my death, without him having to lift a finger. It was a good plan, I admit. I would have done the same myself, against anyone but Deng Ai.”

“Because he did not raise a hand against you.”

“Quite the contrary. I said nothing of the warrant, only that I had some important matter to discuss with him in private—but it could wait, oh, it could wait. From the tone of my voice—who knows? I suppose he suspected it was something unpleasant about Zhong Hui, something he wanted to defer from finding out, for as long as he could. Deng Ai was a man who had suffered more than he ever showed, you know, who had seen too many of his companions fall in battle or turn to the enemy side. So we drank and welcomed the new year, he drank most of all, and I was given the quarters of an honored guest. In the middle of the night I roused him from sleep and put him in chains.”

Wei Guan spoke lightly, as if describing nothing more than a book he had read, and momentarily Jia Chong had trouble picturing the slight figure of the man before him capturing someone with as much towering presence as Deng Ai. “You hadn’t needed to,” he said.

“You mean I could have told of the plot against him, and rushed back with him to capture Zhong Hui instead?” Wei Guan made a brief noise like a laugh. “Very heroic. I am not even sure I am speaking to the same Jia Gonglu anymore. No, I returned to Chengdu, with Deng Ai a prisoner a few days behind, and the look on Zhong Hui’s face then—you recall that he could make the most indignant motions with his eyebrows. Well, I was all the way in the shit then. But they had to keep me at their side after that, no matter how much they wanted me dead. I’d fulfilled what they’d asked of me, after all, and they needed any help they could get with such a mad scheme. No, they couldn’t kill me, not with Jiang Wei’s talk of benevolence and Zhong Hui’s constant fear. You don’t think he was afraid? The most confident are the most fearful of all.” Wei Guan gazed up at the sky momentarily, with an untroubled contemplative look that was nothing like pity. “Zhong Hui told me, eventually, all the reasons why he did it. I just had to sit around with him long enough. However much he hated me didn’t matter, he was a child and just needed someone to tell.”

“So do you.”

“I am not unburdening my conscience like he was. Rather, you should consider it an object-lesson, Jia Gonglu. Of all the reasons he gave for rebellion—that he was chosen for greatness and wanted to distinguish himself, that he had never been appreciated by his family, or seen as what he was aside from his family name—I think one thing was the truest. He thought Zishang did not set him apart. For all the times that Zishang had called him a dear friend, he had never graced him with any honors in the professional realm. And because of that, because of how simply Zhong Hui saw the world after all, and how Zishang did not—he considered Zishang a liar.”

Sima Zhao had always wanted to be everyone’s only exception, but there was no way you were ever going to become his. Jia Chong was not surprised that someone else had arrived at this conclusion. “All rulers must deceive to some degree, must separate the public from the private,” he said diplomatically.

“And how many understand that? Zhong Hui clung to Jiang Wei, I noticed, because he thought he was different, he thought that here was a leader who would treat him as an equal. Though he did not ever speak it, I knew that was what he wanted more than victory or power, just the simple acknowledgement of someone he believed—though he would never admit—to be better than himself. Such a mistake, that. Jiang Wei was a bigger liar than all of Jin put together, had been learning to lie for much longer. In order to be a zealous believer, to live for an idea, one had to start with lying to oneself.”

To live for the idea of a person, too—but Jia Chong did not say that. “So what was your role in it, when things fell apart?”

“I hardly did anything,” Wei Guan said mildly. “They declared their intent to their troops, that they would march on Changan and vanquish Sima Zhao, and of course the officers under their command revolted. Theirs was not a scheme so captivating to other ears as they had believed. The fifteenth of January, I believe it was. Such a cold wind, going outside from a warm room could just about stop your heart. In a hurry they threw all the officers who refused to comply into a prison, and then for all the afternoon the two of them remained atop the city walls, bundled in coats and scarves and standing next to each other but not speaking, maybe not even able to be heard by each other above the wind.”

“A scene you appreciated, I am sure.”

“I will remember it for all time to come. It’s strange how things look different in winter—how the light reveals the bones of things, all that is concealed other times of year. There were two more days like that, of tension and waiting, and I was the only one among the officers who walked free with them, who said I would support their cause. By then Zhong Hui had no idea what to do. News would get out, and he had to attack before Sima Zhao did, so at last he resolved to put all the recalcitrant officers to death, attack the capital with whatever soldiers remained loyal to him, bet it all. The night he decided on that we sat with the lamps lit, surveying each other with weapons at our side. He didn’t dare to sleep, Gonglu. I was one of the last people he could command, and in my presence he didn’t dare to sleep.”

“Don’t sound so pleased, you hadn’t dared either, by the sound of it.”

“I didn’t need to, I was too awake with knowing it was all about to unravel. And besides, he had five blades hovering in the air, god knows how he made them do it, while I just had one I could barely lift. It would have been simply unwise. But such tension was, of course, enough to make me quite ill. The next day, the day on which I was supposed to order the soldiers to kill their own commanding officers, and _placate_ them, god knows how, I found that I could not get out of bed, and by midmorning showed all signs of impending demise.”

“Did Zhong Hui not send a physician to examine you? I can hardly believe he would not have taken every precaution.”

“He never had reason to suspect, and was probably relieved that he could kill me without spilling blood. And besides, I had drank something to make myself convincingly ill.”

“You’re quite mad.”

“Is that a tone of appreciation I detect, Jia Gonglu? Better mad and uncomfortable than dead, of course. Zhong Hui did not come to see me, that last day; as I said, he was always afraid of circumstances that would force him to say what he really thought. Jiang Wei was the only one who brought him out of it, I imagine. All so predictable. Terribly tragic, and predictable. And so that night, while they slept or tried to, while I was supposed to be dying, I went and roused the troops, released the imprisoned officers, and we charged into the city fortress. It was as bright as day, with all the torches, and not even cold. The shouts and cheers of the soldiers around me, Gonglu—you would have been relieved to hear it. That was how happy the men were, to not have to betray the kingdom they served. How happy they were to once again defend your Zishang.”

There was a proper retort to that, but Jia Chong could not think of it. “And you, you were merely happy to save your own hide, to be considered the hero of the hour?”

“I _was_ happy, but could I explain why and would you understand, really?” Wei Guan closed his eyes in a brief delighted smile. “If Zhong Hui had managed to march on the capital, if Deng Ai had never been arrested and it fell upon him to act, if any of a number of things happened, then we would have had a civil war, not even a year after the conquest of Shu. Just when you lot had thought you could breathe easily again, that there was no one left to distrust. And who is to say you would have won? I prevented that from happening, restored stability to this country.”

“I know you have no care for stability, for the country or any of its leaders, not anything else. You just want to be able to say you did this thing, that you won against all odds, outwitted them all with no one left to contradict you.”

“Dear Gonglu, do you think this is a game to me?”

“Do you claim it isn’t?”

Wei Guan studied Jia Chong for a moment, their faces equally pale and unblinking, breaths visible in the winter air. “When he came at me I counted,” he finally said. “One, then two—when he sent all his blades at me, I was only able to knock the first two away. The third cut off a lock of my hair, grazed the side of my face. The fourth he thought had killed me, but he wanted to make sure, and when the fifth came flying toward me I turned it around and sent it back. When I told you I hadn’t figured out how he did it, I was lying.”

“You were able to win against him so simply? I must say I am surprised.”

“Did you think I aimed his own weapon back at him? Even for a split second, if he thought about it, he could have taken control of it again. No, I wanted him to stop thinking. I wanted to _kill_ him, Gonglu. And so I aimed it at Jiang Wei.”

Jia Chong did not know what sort of face he was regarding Wei Guan with now, but it made the other laugh. “And what of Deng Ai? You can hardly expect me to believe that instead of being freed from imprisonment, he was killed by some nameless soldier in the chaos, when he was so popular with all.”

“You shouldn’t even need to ask.” Wei Guan meticulously produced a pair of gloves and a long scarf from his coat, all in black, and put them on carefully. “It’s not getting any warmer out here, and I think I must be off. I hope you have heard all you wanted to know, Gonglu.”

The thought came to Jia Chong as clear and cold as the icicles hanging from the eaves: if he killed his man here and now, Sima Zhao would not blame him, would not even question why. Perhaps there would even be a note of gratitude in his voice, the next time they spoke. He was not carrying his axes, but as always he kept other weapons on his person, quick little daggers lining his coat and strapped to his boots. He had a suspicion that Wei Guan had rehearsed for his own death often enough that he would not even be surprised.

“Do you have something else to say, Gonglu?”

“I should like to thank you.”

He did not need to elaborate. Wei Guan nodded, squinting into the sun and smiling pleasantly like an amused cat. Jia Chong was going to let him go, then. Watch him walk off into the winter whiteness and forget this exchange between them ever happened.

(Because if I had done what you did, Zishang would never have forgiven me.

But if neither of us had done it, if those two yet lived, Zishang would have still been laughing with one and listening to the other, when that is the last thing he needs. It is past time, far past time, for him to finally—)

“How does it feel to be honest with yourself at last, Jia Gonglu?”

Wei Guan had not walked away, had taken hold of the light blue carving Jia Chong wore at his chest. “A lovely work of art,” he said. “And a lovely shade of blue. The late Lord Sima Yi always liked to say that the dye used for our light blue is derived from the darker one, the one that used to color the banners of the Cao family. But ours is far superior, he would always conclude. And so one dynasty is born out of another, and so entire histories and ideas are supplanted. Keep this reminder close to yourself, my friend, I imagine it is worth more than I ever will know.”

“Let go of that,” Jia Chong said in an amicably menacing voice, “or lose your hand. One or the other.”

Wei Guan let go, and Jia Chong felt the weight of the object return, heavy around his neck. “I know what you think of me,” the other man said in a softer tone that suggested, almost, that it was a pity. “That you believe the evil I have done unpardonable, because you cannot fathom my reasons, while that which you have done is excusable, because your intentions were good. But it would be far easier if you, too, lived for yourself, if you admitted what shade of blue your own eyes are.”

“You forget who you are speaking to, Wei Boyu. I will warn you in sincerity now, one day you will come to a bad end.”

“Oh, no doubt about that. And you will be respected until you are old, loved by your darling wife and daughters, and no one but yourself will know what you were too afraid to do. In all honesty, I would hate to see that happen. You are one of the few people I can hold a real conversation with. It’s almost a shame that you won’t understand and I can’t quite explain, why I have been how I have been.” Wei Guan placed a gloved hand on Jia Chong’s shoulder, a gesture of neither camaraderie nor assurance but simply there. “When I was younger I really had been deathly ill, and I had thought then only that it would be terrible to die before I knew everything I could hope to know. The country was in flux, but every story of chaos has to end somehow. Everything I’ve done since then was to ensure I could see it unfold, write it myself if need be. What I have come to learn is this: when you have nothing to lose and nothing to adore, when all experience is defined only as what you do and do not yet know, there is nothing to lament and nothing to fear in the world. That will be my sincerest advice to you, even if you do not agree with anything else I have said. Never be afraid to find out what the future might hold.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> To the bitter end.

_Everyone knows._

 

In the days that followed, Sima Zhao did not act as if anything had hurt him, and the smile he wore on his face was not different in any discernible way. In the afternoon hours he was often seen talking with Yuanji, sometimes until the sun went down. Jia Chong did not try to guess what they spoke of, whether she had told him, matter-of-factly, with the gentleness left for Zhao himself to infer, that everything was going to be all right. He had almost come close to doing so himself. Just a look, a turn of the head, an assuring smile: _I will always be near you, and everything is going to be all right._

But there were things that could not be set right again. “Do you know what they are saying in the city now?” Wei Guan told him with a little half-smile, a few weeks into spring. “When they want to say something is too obvious, they say, _it is as plain as Sima Zhao’s ambition, known to every person in the street._ ”

You did not always measure defeat in terms of cities surrendered and soldiers fallen. Sometimes an irrevocable loss was as simple as the introduction of a new idiom in the language, just a few choice words that even the passage of a thousand years was not going to wash out. Jia Chong did not bring up the phrase with Zhao himself. His lord, his friend, the accidental usurper whose ambition was now known to every pensioner and peasant, merchant and milliner, to old crooked men who remembered the Han and toddling children who barely knew how to read—Sima Zhao would just shake his head and laugh. Would pretend, for Jia Chong’s sake, that he was hearing it for the first time.

And then Jia Chong would have to argue back, would have to turn his voice low and harsh in suggesting that the phrase be banned, the very utterance of the words made a crime. Zhao would look at him in incredulity: _don’t you think you’ve done enough?_ No, some types of defeat were too subtle and too devastatingly whole to admit. If he brought this up with Zhao then he would be compelled to shout, at some point in the near future, _everything I’ve done and not done, everything for you, was just so that this moment would not come to pass! Just so that you wouldn’t be the sort of person about whom such things are said!_ That was what he would have to admit, and so he never did.

Late at night, while Lady Guo lay faintly smiling in her dreams, he sat up writing by the barest flicker of lamplight. Even confession looked insincere when written in his sparse remorseless hand, and after a while he burned the letter, the brief illumination of the paper casting the room into a light blue and cold. Tomorrow, he thought, I will talk to him.

So that was how they came to it, the start and the end. Zhao was going out as he was coming in, on that bluest of mornings over the stone steps in front of the imperial palace. Sun and shadow in a brief intersection, glances but no words. He thought that he had held Zhao’s gaze for long enough to convey what it was that he wanted to say, thought that the silence he had gotten in response was sufficient. They would talk later. Or maybe Zhao would be the one to write him a letter instead; Zhao, who always tried to avoid the extra work of writing compositions as a youth, might after all find that there were some things easier written than said. When he dreamed it for long enough, the very thought of there being such a letter became true, had to be real.

Later—it had been afternoon, if he remembers correctly, monsoon clouds just beginning to gather over the city as he sat taking the color off his nails, painstakingly wiping away every stain the color of night and ink and things untold. Suddenly he had looked up, as if a peal of thunder had jolted the world to its core, though there had been no thunder and no rain. Yuanji was standing in front of him, her face as small and pale as a white blossom, Yuanji and others he recognized and some he did not.

He knew what she was going to say before she said it. Held up a hand, as if to defer the inevitable, but when his own lips parted no words came out.

“Zishang is gone.”

Perhaps it did rain.

 

 

.

 

 

 

“So it was him,” Lady Guo says. “You need not have feared, my foolish love. I would never have guessed. But that hardly matters now.” The dark has been drawn tightly around their house, a curtain of rain and night, and he does not hear.

“At least it had been sudden,” Yuanji says to him. The next day, or the next week. It is morning, the light as pale as the banners of mourning hanging over the city. “Zishang would never have had the patience for old age and infirmity, would have said in that way of his, _what a bother_.” She does not cry, but it is the first and last time, looking at her face, that he sees her as small and frail. He cannot force himself to ask her whether Zishang had left him anything, a message, a letter, just a word.

Months after that he finds himself kneeling in front of Zhao’s son Yan, a youth who almost has his father’s face, and a darkly self-assured resolve in his eyes that Zhao never had. “You have my absolute loyalty,” Jia Chong hears himself say. “No matter what happens next.” What happens next is that Yan declares himself emperor of a new dynasty at last, claims the title that his forefathers had never dared to, in spite of their ambition so apparent to every person in the street. During the takeover there is little chaos, hardly any bloodshed. There is simply no one left who dares stand up to them now. The Jin is a dynasty built up by murderers and thieves, people say, and then shrug and go on to whatever it is they had been intending to do.

But no one forgets. They are in the last years of an era of chaos that has lasted nearly a century, and everyone wants to be a historian. “Jia Chong!” an official named Yu Chun, the sort who always worries about the decline of civilization, shouts at him during a banquet one year. “All the evils in this country are your fault alone!”

He laughs, runs his fingers across the thing he wears at his neck. “You’ll be famous for saying that, one day.”

Yu Chun flings a cup of wine in his face, and later Wei Guan is the one who wipes it off him carefully, amusement written into the corners of his mouth. “You should have killed him for that. The former you would have, at least, and the Emperor Yan would have pardoned you.”

“I am no longer the same.”

“You might be familiar with many wicked arts, Jia Gonglu, but not that of deception. You can never stop being who you were. Those who need you will not let you change. Those who hate you will not want you to.”

It is true that the country never stops reminding him of what he has done. He used to think that he would not mind it, whatever names he was called; in those earlier days Zishang’s presence had burned away those accusations like a blazing sun. But now he is beginning to see that in the absence of light one cannot build a wall out of shadow. A few years later they take the Kingdom of Wu, in another battle that is more predestined anticlimax than anything else, and the country is finally, indisputably united. By then the long history of their era hardly seems a story worth the telling. The Emperor of Wu in his crimson robes bows before them in surrender, and Jia Chong finds himself asking, perhaps as a lesson for Yan because he is after all still too willful and imperious, “I hear you were a tyrant who has devised too many cruel tortures to count. What crime could possibly justify the use of such excessive punishment?”

The Emperor Sun Hao is neither humiliated nor cowed. “We reserve these punishments only for traitors and assassins,” he says, and fixes his eyes on Jia Chong with a smile.

So no one has forgotten, not from the great deserts and steppes of the north to the warm countries beyond the great river in the south, from the impassable mountains to the shimmering sea. It would not have been so bad, if all they remembered was that Jia Chong had once murdered the Emperor of Wei. But the story they tell always has a second part: Sima Zhao knew, Sima Zhao approved, it could not have been more obvious.

At some point you live with it. At some point you realize it is a game no one can win.

Li Wan is back in the city; the news reaches him in whispers of origins uncertain, birdsong and rustles of branches in the wind. He thinks of going to see her, thinks that if he tells her everything he has done and kept from doing, since they parted from each other, that she would be able to pull a thread of narrative out of his life and give him something like an answer. Then he thinks of Lady Guo’s eyes and the blood on their bedroom floor, and knows that such a meeting will end with at least one of them dead. No, nothing so dramatic. He just doesn’t want to see her.

Lady Guo does go to see her; he learns of this later, when his wife is laughing shakily, bringing a cup to her lips. “What sort of person were you before I met you, love? She scares even me.”

So it is very clear, really, why he cannot go back to Li Wan. They will remains as strangers, neighbors. They will not be buried in the same grave. He thinks of the poem they had written, once; why had Zhao never been patient enough to sit down and write a poem?

“Father,” Nanfeng says, her voice petulant and clear, some quality about it reminiscent of cold water and small dense shadows at midday. “You promised.” He is sleeping, then he is pretending to sleep. His daughter stands over him. “You said that you would never interfere in what I chose, if I should pursue what I truly desired.”

“You don’t know what you want,” he says, so noncommittal that for a moment he almost sounds like Zhao to himself, and tents the book he was reading over his face. “Even your father doesn’t know what he wants. And I do not recall having promised you anything.”

“I never asked you for presents, whenever you were away. Not jewels or dresses.”

“The dresses they make at all the famous shops are too long for you.”

“ _Father—_ ” Nanfeng stamps a little black boot on the ground. Jia Chong has found out, not long ago, that she keeps a knife in it, just as he did. He has never found reason to bring it up. “I am asking you for just one thing. Have I not been a good child to you? Just one little thing, that I so dearly desire.”

“Fine. What is it?”

“I want Sima Zhong’s hand in marriage. The crown prince.” At the shocked look on his face she laughs, bright as the tinkling of glass, of blades against each other. The book has slipped to the floor. “Don’t look at me that way, Father. We don’t lie to each other in this family, that’s what you always said. So should I phrase it differently? I want this country.”

Sima Zhong is Sima Yan’s son; good-natured but a slow learner, painfully naïve and indecisive when it comes to anything that matters. A boy who can be persuaded of anything by anyone, not that any has yet dared to try. If the country had been presided over by anyone other than Sima Yan, then the boy would never have been made crown prince. But the only other choice was Yan’s younger brother Sima You, a talented and elegant young man who had seemed nearly too good to be mortal, too good to be true. There had been a great controversy over succession in the last few years, schemes and accusations, Yan claiming with a straight face that You had been attempting to overthrow him. Jia Chong had nodded and corroborated the story. But Sima Yan with all his innumerable riches and forgettable lovers did not even need an accomplice, did not believe in the necessity of shadow when he thought himself brightest light. In the end Jia Chong’s own part in it had a sense of negligibility to it, and when the younger brother had died choking on his own blood in exile, he had not even felt like a murderer.

What he tries not to think of now: Zishang had liked his second son better; had loved both of them, of course, but doted on Sima You especially. There was once when, dandling the child on his knee, Sima Zhao had said to him, _this throne will be yours one day_. Jia Chong had not meant to walk in the room at that moment. Had compelled himself to forget it, because it had seemed something too personal for him to overhear.

And Zishang would not have let Sima Yan indulge in his excesses, would have secured for Sima Zhong an untroubled life like the one he had longed to have himself. Zishang would not have agreed with a good number of things that had happened since his death, and all of them done because Jia Chong could not stop being loyal to his name.

“You’ll make it happen,” Nanfeng tells him now. “You always did say that the Jia and Sima clans are bound together by a sense of duty even more powerful than fate. What better honor is there than for our names to be joined in marriage at last?” She does not realize that she does not sound sincere, her voice so quick with excitement that she can hardly choke out the words. There are dark circles under her eyes, fire beneath her translucent skin. He cannot think of a way to argue back.

Wei Guan is the last person to disagree. “Your Imperial Grace,” he says, and does only a halfhearted curtsy before Sima Yan. “Please reconsider this decision. The women of the Jia lineage have always been notoriously jealous in their disposition, and hardly comely of appearance. And _short_ ,” he adds, as if that is a particular insult.

“Then who do you suggest Prince Zhong marry?” Jia Chong fires back. “One of your family?”

“It would be a far more prestigious choice.”

Jia Chong surveys him with the sort of frigid glare that can make anyone imagine their own head on a plate, but Wei Guan does not back down, returns it with an unflinching stare of his own. Sima Yan puts a hand to his forehead; he will have to think about it, he says. They exit the hall with footsteps echoing and leave him on his throne, brows knitted in frustration. It is a difficult decision, Jia Chong admits. They are asking him to choose in whose hands to leave the country. Because—(what he does not want to think, next: the Sima clan has already lost their rule.)

“You don’t have to fight me for this,” he says to Wei Guan when they are outside. There are damp-looking plum blossoms on the trees, already beginning to fall apart. It looks as though it will rain.

“There are no other fights left, no other great gambles to take.” Wei Guan gives him a thin smile. “Remember what I used to say, Gonglu? I thought I was talented, but you were _gifted_. Yet our paths never intersected, so I could not really compare. And I still want to know. I’ve always wanted to know.”

“You want to know whether I can kill you? I can demonstrate easily enough.”

“I am not so sure now. These past few years, Gonglu. _Decades_. You have never been able to regain what was once yours alone, that glorious revelry of wickedness. You let people point fingers at you now without remembering what it had all been for. If only you’d been more honest with yourself, my poor friend. But there’s still time. I want you to give it your all. If you really wish for your daughter to become Empress one day, then _mean_ it, Jia Gonglu. Remember how the Sima clan took over from the Cao, that took three generations too, and who cares now that it started with the best of intentions? If you could really do it then I would gladly be your last obstacle. Don’t feel like you still owe Zishang anything, my friend. As I always said. Don’t fear what the future has in store.”

Jia Chong strikes him hard enough to send him sprawling. When Wei Guan scrambles to his feet he is laughing in spite of the blood running down his face. “Is that all?” he asks, voice on the edge of some hysterical hilarity. “Dearest Gonglu, is that all you are?”

He walks off without a backward glance. Later that year Nanfeng and the crown prince will be married, and the entire populace will celebrate with the kind of fervor that is only possible when trying to cover up an almost unbearable sense of terror. Not long after she will lick the blood of the last obstacle off her hands, though even her arts will be unable to remove the smile from his face. In the years that follow she will rule the country in all but name, and every soul in the court will hate her and fear her yet secretly hope to be her one exception. She will speak of _him_ fondly; she will say, my father taught me all that I know.

Nanfeng’s reign will not endure for long. The storm will break; there will be civil wars and invasions, centuries of chaos after just decades of unification, the burning of a hundred cities and a million books. All the good undone. The Jin dynasty will be a brief sigh in the annals of history, a whispered footnote. There will be pejoratives written next to all of their names.

He will not see any of this. Not long after the wedding he will die in his sleep, hardly a surprise, those who knew him will say, given his age and how relentless he had worked all his life. It will sound like praise, but there will be few attendees at the funeral. For now, as he is walking away from the courtyard and its bleary flowering trees, he feels only a weariness too deep to come from even his bones. Momentarily he thinks of turning back and continuing their argument. It isn’t that he is afraid of what the future might hold. It is that—he pauses in his footsteps for a moment, when he realizes what it is he wants to say.

_I finally understand what you’d felt back then, Zishang. It was all too much, what I put us both through was too much, and I no longer want to know._

 

 

 

 

 

**Afterimage**

 

And yet you dream:

You dream of the southern wind rising and surging through the city, carrying like a tide the scent of flowers and summer earth and blood. The screens rattle and shake, the banners snap nervously, and in the groves of trees the shifting sighs of branch and leaf are like music. You dream of dust; the wind rips the tiles from the rooftops, the pillars from the great halls, uprooting entire edifices until the city itself crumbles in a storm of sand and shale. In the aftermath you kneel in pale dust the color of ash, searching and sifting endlessly for something with your stained hands. Finally you uncover a piece of paper so faded with time that you cannot tell what was once written on its surface. You think that it is a map. You think that it is a letter you have never read, written in a hand you once knew.

 


End file.
